Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Harry Potter in London

Last, but certainly not least, was our time in London with Harry Potter. On Sunday, we surprised the children with tickets to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and it was wonderful- truly a spectacular show! The actors were wonderful, the sets amazing, the scene changes were like a dance and the story felt right (much different than reading the play/book).

I've had lots of questions about how I got tickets and I'm afraid it was just luck and persistence. Back in January, when we decided to book our trip, I started looking for tickets to see the play. Much to my disappointment, tickets were sold out and even though I continued to check, they never became available. I did look on sites such as stub hub but was shocked to discover that our family of four would pay up to $10,000 for the tickets. Clearly, that wasn't going to happen.

The day before I left for England, I just happened to check and there were four seats available! I grabbed them up in record time! While at the theater I asked an attendant about the seats becoming available because I wondered if they simply hold some back to release later in time. She said that they must have been returned tickets because they do from time to time allow returns since they must be bought so far in advance. Our seats were wonderful (I would say we paid the equivalent to a Broadway show) and, fun fact, JJ Abrams sat directly in front of us.

After the show, we wandered around the area where the theater is and just so happened (I swear!) to walk past the theater to find the actors who played Hermione and Harry just finishing up talking to fans. We approached them and chatted with them for a bit and they could not have been nicer or more gracious.

While in London, we also took a bus out to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour. This was fun to see all the artifacts from the actual sets of HP. We learned loads of things about how they filmed the movies. The time, effort, thought and money that went in to producing these movies is mind boggling.

The showstopper was at the end of the tour, where we got to see Hogwarts Castle in all of its glory. This model is what they used for all the castle shots and the pictures don't even come close to portraying its magnificence.